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Post-Modernism Bad – Agency
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Post-Modernism Bad – AgencyFocus on discourse makes real agency impossible – ignores reality Mackinnon, 00 – Catherine A., Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan (“Points Against Postmodernism,” Chicago-Kent Law Review, vol. 75 http://www.adelinotorres.com/filosofia/Against%20Postmodernism.pdf)RK Postmodernism as practiced often comes across as style— petulant, joyriding, more posture than position. But it has a method, making metaphysics far from dead. Its approach and its position, its posture toward the world and its view of what is real, is that it’s all mental. Postmodernism imagines that society happens in your head. Back in the modern period, this position was called idealism. In its continuity with this method, to offer a few examples, postmodernism has made the penis into “the phallus” and it is mostly observed to signify.32 Women have become “an ongoing discursive practice,”33 or, ubiquitously, “the female body,”34 which is written on and signified but seldom, if ever, raped, beaten, or otherwise violated. Racism and homophobia are elided “differences” in disguise. Abuse has become “agency”—or rather challenges to sexual abuse have been replaced by invocations of “agency,” women’s violation become the sneering wound of a “victim” pinned in arch quotation marks.35 Instead of facing what was done to women when we were violated, we are told how much freedom we had at the time. (For this we need feminism?) Agency in the postmodern lexicon is a stand-in for the powerless exercising power; sometimes it means freedom, sometimes self-action, sometimes resistance, sometimes desire. We are not told which of these is meant, precisely, or how any or all of these things are possible under the circumstances. It would be good to know. Oddly missing in this usage is what an agent legally is: someone who acts for someone else, the principal, who is pulling their strings. Domination, postmodernists know exists, but they don’t tell us how or where or why. It is something that no one does or has done to them but somehow winds up in “gendered lopsidedness.”36 What we used to call “what happened to her,” has become, at its most credible, “narrative.” But real harm has ceased to exist. So whole chapters of books with “pornography” in their titles can be written without ever once talking about what the pornography industry concretely does, who they are, or what is done to whom in and with the materials.37 There is no discussion of how pornography exploits and mass-produces sexual abuse. There is not even an extension of the early work on the scopic drive by Foucault, Lacan, and Irigaray (who are even French)—an analysis that is readily extendable to describe the aggressive appropriation and trafficking of women in pornography.38 Nor have I noticed the multiculturalists out there opposing the spread of pornography from Scandinavia, Germany, and the United States on grounds of cultural imperialism, and it’s taking over the world. The point of postmodernism is to get as far away from anything real as possible. Postmodern feminists seldom build on or refer to the real lives of real women directly; mostly, they build on the work of French men, if selectively and often not very well.39 Foucault, for instance, studied some real practices, though he mostly missed gender, which from the standpoint of feminism is a rather big thing to miss. Foucault’s elision of gender, feminist postmodernists try endlessly to fix, but his actual engagement with reality—“I’m an empiricist”40—they have totally abandoned. Feminist postmodernism is far, far away from the realities of the subordination of women. All women should be so fortunate. Post Modernism Bad – Action/Turns the AltReality exists – even if it is constructed, focus on discourse makes action impossible and destroys the alternative Mackinnon, 00 – Catherine A., Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan (“Points Against Postmodernism,” Chicago-Kent Law Review, vol. 75 http://www.adelinotorres.com/filosofia/Against%20Postmodernism.pdf)RK C. Reality It is my view that it is the relation of theory to reality that feminism changed, and it is in part a reversion to a prefeminist relation of theory to reality that postmodernism is reimposing. This is not about truth. Truth is a generality, an abstraction of a certain shape and quality. Social realities are something else again. Postmodernism has decided that because truth died with God, there are no social facts. The fact that reality is a social construction does not mean that it is not there; it means that it is there, in society, where we live. According to postmodernism, there are no facts; everything is a reading, so there can be no lies. Apparently it cannot be known whether the Holocaust is a hoax, whether women love to be raped, whether Black people are genetically intellectually inferior to white people, whether homosexuals are child molesters. To postmodernists, these factish things are indeterminate, contingent, in play, all a matter of interpretation. Similarly, whether or not acts of incest happened or are traumatic to children become fogged over in “epistemological quandaries” as beyond thinking, beyond narrative, beyond intelligibility, as “this event that is no event”—as if survivors have not often reported, in intelligible narratives, that such events did happen and did harm them.41 That violation often damages speech and memory does not mean that, if one has speech and memory, one was not violated. Recall when Bill Clinton, asked about his sexual relationship with a young woman intern, said that it all depended on what “is” means. The country jeered his epistemic dodge as a transparent and slimy subterfuge to evade accountability: get real. The postmodernists were strangely silent. But you can’t commit perjury if there are no facts. Where are these people when you need them? What postmodernists want, I have come to think, apart from to live in their heads instead of in the world (that old dodge), is to vault themselves out of power methodologically. They want to beat dominance at its own game, which is usually called dominating. They want to win every argument in advance. Also, if everything is interpretation, you can never be wrong. Feminism has faced that you don’t know what is real by getting outside your determinants (which you can’t do anyway) but by getting deep inside them with a lot of other people with the same foot (even feet) on their necks. Abdicating this, feminism’s source of power, postmodernism has swallowed the objective standpoint while claiming to be off on a whole new methodological departure. Then they sigh and admit they might have to concede partiality,42 meaning admitting only knowing part. What, again, was the alternative? Totality? What’s wrong with partiality—except from the objective standpoint, which thinks it means you can’t be right? Who said there is either the whole or a part? Postmodernism keeps becoming what it claims to supersede.43 If feminism is modernist—which is highly problematic, as it is as much a critique of modernism44—and postmodernists want to be postfeminist, they have to take feminism with them and go further. They often claim to. To be postmodern in this sense, the insights of modernism and its critics into the inequalities of sex, race, and class must, it seems to me, be taken on board before they can be gone beyond.45 Instead of superceding these insights, postmodernists routinely elaborately deny them, ignore them, act like they are not there. This is premodern, as if feminism never existed. On the question of continuity, whether postmodernism has much if anything to say that modernism didn’t, is also worth asking. The great modern, Gertrude Stein, wrote in 1946: “[T]here aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been an answer, that’s the answer.”46 How is postmodernism “post” that? What I mean to say on the question of reality in theory is this: When something happens to women, it happens in social reality. The perspective from women’s point of view does not mean that women’s reality can only be seen from there, hence is inaccessible to anyone else and can’t be talked about and does not exist. Rather, what can be seen from the point of view of the subordination of women has been there all along—too long. We wish it didn’t exist but it can’t be wished out of existence. Anyone can see it. It can be found. It can be ascertained. It can even be measured sometimes. It can be discussed. Before us, it has been missed, overlooked, made invisible. In other words, the harm of second class human status does not pose an abstract reality question. In social life, there is little that is subtle about most rapes; there is nothing complex about a fist in your face; there is nothing nuanced about genocide—although many nuanced questions no doubt can be raised about them. These social realities, central to feminism, do not raise difficult first-order reality questions, not any more. It is the denial of their social reality that is complicated and raises difficult philosophical questions. Understand that the denial of the reality of such events has been a philosophical position about reality itself. Unless and until effectively challenged, only what power wants to see as real is granted reality status. Reality is a social status. Power’s reality does not have to establish itself as real in order to exist, because it has the status as real that power gives it; only the reality of the powerless has to establish itself as real. Power can also establish unreality—like the harmlessness of pornography or smoking—as reality. That doesn’t make it harmless. But until power is effectively challenged on these lies, and they are lies, only those harmed (and those harming them, who have every incentive to conceal) have access to knowing that that is what they are. So it has taken us all this time, and a movement that has challenged male power, to figure out that women’s reality is also a philosophical position: that women’s reality exists, including women’s denied violation, therefore social reality exists separate from its constitution by male power or its validation by male knowledge. This analysis raises some questions about postmodernism that are not simply a report on my current mental state. They are: Can postmodernism stop the rape of children when everyone has their story, and everyone is presumably exercising sexual agency all the time? Can postmodernism identify fascism if power only exists in microcenters and never in systematic, fixed, and determinate hierarchical arrangements? How can you oppose something that is always only in play? How do you organize against something that isn’t even really there except when you are thinking about it? Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable? If the subject is dead, and we are dealing with deeds without doers,47 how do we hold perpetrators accountable for what they perpetrate? Can the Serbian cultural defense for the extermination of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovar Albanians be far behind? If we can have a multicultural defense for the current genocide, because that’s how the Serbs see it, why not a German cultural defense for the earlier one? Anti-Semitism was part of German culture. Finally, for another old question, if you only exist in opposition, if you are only full in opposition to the modern,48 it has determined you. Don’t you need an account of how you are not merely reiterating your determinations? From postmodernists, one is not yet forthcoming. The postmodernist reality corrosion, thus, not only makes it incoherent and useless—the pragmatists’ valid criticism49—but also regressive, disempowering, and collaborationist. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.86 Mb. Share with your friends:
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